Dogs

It is now bitterly cold - minus 27 and falling - but still beautifully sunny, with wonderful blue skie and fabulous "arctic sunsets". However, 20 mins outside is about all I can stand at the moment, even wearing my thermal vest and body warmer, woolly tights and jeans, arran jumper, fleece, big windproof jacket, hat with hood up, huge boots and gloves and a scarf wrapped round my face ....

Of coure it is very very hard for the stray dogs who roam the streets. They are left over from the Russian population who departed in 1990, so suddenly that they left behind their pets (and also a few children who were staying with local families when the order came through). The descendants of these dogs (and occasional cats) are now roaming the streets of the town, scavenging. People often throw them scraps, and so the dogs are generally very tame and good-natured. But once it gets cold, they start to get thinner and thinner as their bodies need much more calories to stay warm, and competition for food grows ....

So once the coldest days start, somebody (the council? the police? I don't know) gets the job of driving round town and culling the dogs. The policy seems to be to just shoot as many as possible, rather than taking out the oldest & weakest. There are so many strays that the few you don't get will soon reproduce and there will be dozens of them roaming around by the summer again. It makes sense, but it is truly horrible to hear the gunshots, with occasional howls of distress. I used to feed this old dog who slept behind my building - every morning I would put a slice of bread on the veranda for the birds, and give him one too. Then, on Saturday, 5 minutes after he'd been fed, a car drove up and somebody rolled down the window and leaned out and shot him. It took 2 bullets, and he still took about 10 minutes to die. Horrible.